Technological advances in computing devices and networking continue to provide greater access to a wide variety of information and services allowing access from virtually anywhere in the world. Virtual offices are becoming more commonplace since the work that needs to be done can be performed from most locations. Businesses recognize the importance of meetings to effectively address customer needs and to move product development forward, for example. However, bringing users together to conduct business from the many remote locations at which the user could be and supporting the many available communications devices and media types remains a challenging prospect.
Conferencing can be an effective means by which employees of a corporate enterprise, for example, can conduct meetings. However, given the location and connection capabilities at any point in time, participants may want to join via different media types. With the advances in storage and computing power of portable wireless computing devices, users now are capable of interacting with many types of disparate data types such as images, video clips, audio data, and textual data, for example. This is facilitated by several types of devices that users can now employ and with which to connect to the session. For example, one user can participate by audio/video from a conference room, another by voice via a desktop computer, and yet another by text input using a cell phone.
During the course of the conference session, however, it can be more productive and beneficial to split the participants into smaller groups such that topics can be addressed in more focused groups. Thereafter, the groups can then rejoin the main conference session and provide the information needed. However, conventional conferencing architectures lack the framework for creating such a session experience in a seamless manner and for distributed implementations.